This document summarizes the history of neocolonialism in Latin America from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. [1] Large multinational companies established extractive industries like banana and rubber plantations that primarily benefited foreign interests and left local workers in poor conditions when the companies left. [2] Authoritarian governments arose that concentrated power and wealth among ruling elites while suppressing democracy, indigenous groups, and political dissent. [3] This neocolonial system dominated Latin America's economies and politics and led to its increased absorption into a global order led by the United States and European powers.

1. Neocolonialism
Born in Blood and Fire, Chapter 6

3. Opera House, Manuas, Brazil
“When [companies] pulled out – because of a banana blight or new corporate strategy –
all that these multinational installations left behind was ex-banana choppers with no job,
no land, no education and a lot of missing fingers.” 189

4. “….’If one rubber baron bought a vast yacht, another would install a tame lion in
his villa, and a third would water his horse on champagne.’ And nothing was
more extravagant than the opera house, with its Italian marble, Bohemian glass,
gilded balconies, crystal chandeliers, Victorian murals, and a dome bathed in
the colors of the national flag.
Prefabricated in Europe and costing an estimated ten million dollars in
taxpayers’ money, the opera house was shipped in pieces more than a thousand
miles up the Amazon River, where laborers were deployed around the clock to
assemble it, working at night under Brazil’s first electric lightbulbs.
It didn’t matter that almost no one from Manaus had heard of Puccini or that
more than half the members of a visiting opera troupe eventually died of yellow
fever. This was the apotheosis of the rubber boom”.
The Lost City of Z

5. EXPORT BOOM
“The direct beneficiaries of this export
bonanza were the large landowners,
whose property values soared with the
approach of the railroad tracks.” 183
“The arrival of the railroad benefitted
the owners of large Mexican estates by
raising property values. But it drove a
lot of peasants off the land, allowing
the landlords to extend their holdings,
make landless peasants their
employees, and multiply their profits.”
184
“Bananas were a neocolonial
nightmare for the palm-studded coasts
of the Caribbean.” 187

6. PORFIRIATO
• Positivism =
“order and progress”
A funny thing happened to the
liberals of Latin America during
their comeback of the 1860s and
1870s. Once in control, they forgot
about the political freedoms they
had demanded under the
conservative caudillos. Democracy
now took a distant second place, in
their thinking, to the material
Progress associated with export
growth. 193
[As a result of import/export tax
revenues funding armies and
police forces]… Now national
presidents commanded far more
David Alfaro Siqueiros, From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution firepower than any regional
caudillo. 193
For the most part, the majority had little say in the matter [of authoritarian governance]. The political influence of the
rural majority was limited by income and literacy requirements for voting, and limited even more by the practice of
managed elections. The authoritarian governments of neocolonial Latin America made electoral management into an
art form. 194
Oligarchies and dictatorships provided stability, the virtue always most desired by foreign investors. 195

7. Rurales and Pan o Palo
As the value of Mexico’s import/export
trade expanded by roughly ten times
during the Porfiriato, President Porfirio
Diaz used the new revenues to
strengthen the Mexican state.
He curbed regional caudillos by crushing them or paying them off. He created public jobs
for middle-class townspeople by vastly enlarging the bureaucracy. Diaz offered just two
alternatives: pan o palo, meaning roughly “carrot or stick.” For example, he subsidized
the press to keep it friendly, then jailed journalists who spoke against him. Mexico
acquired a national rail system and graceful, monument-lined avenues in its capital city.
But as Mexico approached the centennial of Hidalgo’s 1810 uprising, the Mexico City
police had orders to hustle indigenous people away from downtown, so that the foreign
investors would not get the “wrong impression” of Mexico. 195-6.

8. 1900 Mexico City
He grew up in the shadown of Juarez. The man who weeps as he kills, Juarez called him.
“Weeping, weeping, he’ll kill me if I’m not careful.”
Porfirio Diaz has been ruling Mexico for a quarter of a century. The official biographers record for
posterity jos yawns and his aphorisms. They do not note it down when he says:
“The best Indian is six feet underground.”
“Kill them on the spot.”
“Don’t stir up the herd on me.”
“The herd” are legislators, who vote Yes when their heads nod from sleepiness, and who call Don
Porfirio the Unique, the Indispensable, the Irreplaceable. The people call him “Don Perfidy” and make
fun of his courtiers:
“What time is it?”
“Whatever you say, Senor President.”
The shot-while-trying-to-escape law is applied to the rebellious and the courteous. At the height of Pax
Porfiriana, Mexico makes progress. Messages that previously went by mule, horse, or pigeon, now fly
over seventy thousand kilometers of telegraph wire. Where stagecoaches used to go , there are fifteen
thousand kilometers of railroad. On every big estate a fortress rises. From the battlements, guards keep
watch over the Indians, who may not even change masters.
There are no schools of economics but Don Porfirio rules surrounded by “scientists” specializing in the
purchase of lands precisely where the next railway will pass. Capital comes from the United States and
ideas and fashions are ought secondhand in France. Mexico City likes to call itself “the Paris of the
Americas,” although more white peasant pants than trousers are seen in the streets ; and the frock-
coated minority inhabit Second Empire-style palaces. The poets have baptized its evenings “the green
hour” not because of the light through the streets , but in memory of De Musset’s absinthe.

11. “In ideology and values, as in trade
and finance, neocolonialism meant the
absorption of Latin America into an
international system dominated by
Britain and the United States. It is
here, in friction with powerful
outsiders, that Latin Americans began
to feel the colonial in neocolonialism.”
200

12. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine made the US Marines a sort of hemispheric
police force to prevent European military intervention in Latin America. He believed
incompetent Latin American governments would occasionally need correction “by some
civilized nation.” 206

13. REACTIONS
Augusto Cesar Sandino
“Come on you pack of drug fiends, come
on and murder us on our own land. I am
waiting for you on my feet at the head
of my patriotic soldiers, and I don't care
how many of you there are. You should
know that when this happens, the
destruction of your mighty power will
make the Capitol shake in Washington,
and your blood will redden the white
dome that crowns the famous White
House where you plot your crimes.”

14. “Although neocolonial Latin America had grown
economically, it had developed much less.” BBF, 208